Vast amounts of excess heat are generated by industrial processes and by electric power plants; researchers around the world have spent decades seeking ways to harness some of this wasted energy. Most such efforts have focused on thermoelectric devices, solid-state materials that can produce electricity from a temperature gradient, but the efficiency of such devices is limited by the availability of materials.

The Greenland Ice Sheet experienced widespread surface melt in dry zone areas most recently in 1889 and 2012. A study conducted by scientists at Dartmouth College and the Desert Research Institute questioned the reason that dry snow didn’t melt in hotter years such as 2007 or 2010. Accordingly, the researchers hypothesized that the albedo of the snow combined with warm temperatures were responsible for the melting.

When the English author Sir Francis Bacon wrote "The world's a bubble" in 1629, it's a safe bet he wasn't thinking about microfluidics. However, for a research team led by scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Bacon's words could not be truer. Since 2004,their world has revolved around the development of increasingly sophisticated microfluidic devices to produce liquid-filled "bubbles" called liposomes for potential use as vehicles to deliver drugs directly to cancers and other diseased cells within the body.

Crowding has notoriously negative effects at large size scales, blamed for everything from human disease and depression to community resource shortages. But relatively little is known about the influence of crowding at the cellular level. A new JILA study shows that a crowded environment has dramatic effects on individual biomolecules.

A chip-scale device that both produces and detects a specialized gas used in biomedical analysis and medical imaging has been built and demonstrated at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Described in Nature Communications, the new microfluidic chip produces polarized (or magnetized) xenon gas and then detect seven the faintest magnetic signals from the gas.

Music can be soothing or stirring, it can make us dance or make us sad. Blood pressure, heartbeat, respiration and even body temperature – music affects the body in a variety of ways. It triggers especially powerful physical reactions in pregnant women. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig have discovered that pregnant women compared to their non-pregnant counterparts rate music as more intensely pleasant and unpleasant, associated with greater changes in blood pressure.

The scientific progress that has made it possible to dream of a future in which faulty organs could be regrown from stem cells also holds potential as an ethical and greener source for meat. So say scientists who suggest in the Cell Press journal Trends in Biotechnology that every town or village could one day have its very own small-scale, cultured meat factory.